S E R V E R   S I D E
View current page
...more recent posts

Making good progress today, although there is a lot to do in very little time.

Here's my latest working theory. Probably this is obvious, but I don't think it's ever been implemented exactly the way I am doing it. The idea is that since all posts (and comments) are stored in a database, there is remarkable freedom in how I can serve them back up. And recently it occured to me just how similar weblogs, bulletin boards, email lists, and RSS feeds are. They're just different views of the same atomic data.

So I'm extending the system so that any page can be viewed in any of these styles. Making what are now weblog pages into mailing lists is my first task, because a mailing list is what we need. In this scenario the weblog becomes the mailinglist archive. Anything posted to the page gets sent as email to everyone on the list. Same with comments. This is working now, although you have to open a web page to reply (you can't just hit reply in your mail client, you have to click the reply link in the message which will open the proper page in your browser.) So that's a drawback, but I'll have this fixed up fairly soon.

I'll probably make the bulletin board view next, and then the RSS feeds. But I need the mailing list wow. I mean now. Almost there.
- jim 10-31-2002 11:43 pm [link] [add a comment]

I wish I knew sendmail better. If I have to send out 100 identical emails, which is the more efficient way: build a 100 email long BCC: field and mail() it once from PHP, or make a loop and send 100 individual mail()s? I figure it shouldn't really matter, because sendmail still has to send 100 messages either way. Right? Or does the BCC: actually make things easier on my server?
- jim 10-31-2002 3:53 am [link] [add a comment]

Looks like Yahoo is moving to PHP. (via webseitz)
- jim 10-31-2002 3:32 am [link] [add a comment]

Spent all day going through my code making it compatible with PHP 4.2.x. What a serious pain. I also instituted one small internal change so that there is now only one file that needs to be modified when putting the system on a new site.

Tomorrow I'll put the new code base at the apocalypse wow site so we can have better messaging going on there. I forgot to mention that this is probably the "real" reason I've been so involved in this group: it gives me another great testing ground. Helping all of these organizers communicate is really fun.

And I've also put into practice some of the skills I learned watching these people take care of business. Number one being: you have to have a list of stuff to do, and then you just go down the list crossing things off as you do them. Under no circumstances are you to deviate from the list. Not surprisingly, this system works well. It's a pretty big joke that I used to not do this. How did I ever get anything done?

Oh, right, I didn't.
- jim 10-31-2002 3:19 am [link] [add a comment]

Met last night with the apocalypse wow! inner circle. Looks like there is plenty of momentum to keep going. Lots of work to do today. Hopefully we'll get another event together for election night. After that I'm pushing for a pro alternative energy agenda. Not sure if that will happen or not.

My dream is to hook such an effort into something like the Creative Commons (even though it's not set up to deal with anything like new energy technology.) We need the foundational technology for a new free society to be held in trust for the public. And then capitalism (and patents and copyright and profits) can work on top of this open infrastructure. But the base should belong to the people.

Obviously my idea is still quite fuzzy. The dream scenario is where the genius scientist, who makes the renewable energy breakthrough, places her research into the public domain instead of selling it to Mobil. Seems crazy, yet it has worked in the realm of computer software. Very smart people can be tempted by fame (the good kind) as much as by money. Maybe more so. But there has to be a structure set up to encourage this.

The war against Iraq clearly shows how important it is to get oil out of the picture as fast as possible. There's nothing good about war, but this one is so ridiculous maybe it can be a catalyst for real change. Yeah I know: maybe.
- jim 10-30-2002 8:12 pm [link] [2 comments]

The shift.com top 10 defining moments in digital culture.
- jim 10-29-2002 6:13 pm [link] [add a comment]

I lost my mobile charger cord on the DC trip, so it's dead right now. My email here is the best way to reach me until I fix this situation.
- jim 10-27-2002 11:19 pm [link] [1 comment]

13 hours till blast off. I made a page here where I will attempt to photo blog (phlog?) the event. Theoretically I should have wireless data service the whole way. But who knows? This is my first experience with the sidekick outside of NYC.

Busy night tonight making final preparations. This has turned into a really big production. Complete with media on one of the buses. But you can get the scoop (almost) live if you check in here tomorrow.
- jim 10-26-2002 2:02 am [link] [10 comments]

I have to give this a much closer read, but Curious Yellow: The First Coordinated Worm Design is quite intriguing. And scary. Could someone hijack the global mind? (via aaron swartz)
- jim 10-25-2002 6:35 pm [link] [add a comment]

Google news changed their layout a few weeks ago. I cursed the new style, without ever looking for a link to a less graphically intense version. Of course such a link is right there on the front page. Excellent. Now I have my news back the way I like it.

The bad news is that rumors predict google is going to charge for this at some point in the future.
- jim 10-25-2002 6:20 pm [link] [add a comment]

Canon's new professional 11 megapixel camera compared with the "old" (heh!) 6 megapixel monster. How high will it go?
- jim 10-25-2002 6:17 pm [link] [add a comment]

Wow. This protest thing is really taking off. Another long meeting tonight. It's amazing to watch these people go. They really know what they are doing. It's like a crash course in how to have a meeting.

Assuming the GPRS network is working, I'm planning some serious live coverage of this event. Might be kind of fun.

One more long day tomorrow, and then we're off at 7:00 am Saturday. I'll start broadcasting right away. (Or is that narrowcasting?) In any case, stay tuned.
- jim 10-25-2002 8:32 am [link] [add a comment]

So you mean if I just update to the most recent (december 2001) iMac firmware version (2.4f), my dead monitor will come back to life? Yup. It's true.

Not sure how I missed this crucial bit of information, but I'm sure glad to have found it.


Behold! A fully operational deathst... er, iMac.
- jim 10-24-2002 11:38 pm [link] [4 comments]

Peter Rojas breaks the open spectrum party line to the masses in today' new york times (page g7, "what's next") This is the easy to understand version of the stuff David Reed (extensively quoted in the article) has been preaching for some time. Short summary: wireless radio spectrum is not limited. In fact, with the right hardware in place, data carrying capacity increases as the number of wireless devices in a given area increases. This is promised land type stuff.

I'm writing this from my mobile (and I'd sure like some more bandwidth) so I won't include links right now, but you could search my page for 'reed' or 'mesh' or 'ad-hoc' and find lots of stuff if you are curious.
- jim 10-24-2002 9:47 pm [link] [add a comment]

Had a nice dinner with my step sister last night. She turned me on to this information packed site on downtown NYC her company helped build. Lots of information in there (click on downtown guide from the front page.)
- jim 10-24-2002 7:21 pm [link] [add a comment]

Wow. On Monday there was a huge Denial of Service attack against the 13 root name servers that form the core of the internet.

Vixie said only four or five of the 13 servers were able to withstand the attack and remain available to legitimate Internet traffic throughout the strike. "It was an attack against all 13 servers, which is a little more rare than an attack against any one of us," he said.
Here's the slashdot thread.
- jim 10-23-2002 5:54 pm [link] [add a comment]

Is Mitch Kapor going to save us all? You'd think so by the response to his latest project announcement: an open source personal information manager.

Our product (code-named "Chandler" after the great detective novelist Raymond Chandler), is a Personal Information Manager (PIM) intended for use in everyday information and communication tasks, such as composing and reading email, managing an appointment calendar and keeping a contact list. Because of the ease with which Chandler users can share information with others, we might call Chandler the first Interpersonal Information Manager. (The term PIM was first used in conjunction with the product Lotus Agenda in the 1980's. Chandler is the spiritual descendant of Agenda (and has a common designer in Mitch Kapor.)
Mitch has a blog where he talks about what they are doing.
We are trying to make a PIM which is substantive enough and enticing enough to make people want to move to it from whatever they are currently using, which statistically is probably Microsoft Outlook.
If you've ever talked to a business person about switching to unix from microsoft you already know that Outlook is what maintains the monopoly. (Well, OK, Excel and Powerpoint too, but those are easier to deal with.)

Dan Gilmore has a good non technical article that ends with this bit of profound understatement: "This is potentially a big deal."

I think people are going to cast this as the big showdown. Can open source really slay goliath? Or at least give him a bad case of heartburn? The geeks are tripping over themselves to get on board ("Oy am I drooling over the ProductManagement job enough to almost wish I lived out West...." Bill Seitz; "Just look at the architecture and feature list. I must be dreaming! This is way too good to be true!" Aaron Swartz.)

Not only will the entire code base be open source, but it's going to be built with just about every ultra hip open source technology, including python, ZODB, Jabber, RDF, and parts of the mozilla project.

This looks like a really important showdown in the final struggle. Will you control the details of your digital life, or will your digital future be locked into someone else's plan for world domination? Go Mitch!
- jim 10-22-2002 7:21 pm [link] [1 comment]

Lots of people linking to todays Doonesbury. But this isn't the first mention of blogs, I remember blogging this one almost two months ago. Still, this one is more subject matter than mention.
- jim 10-22-2002 3:08 am [link] [add a comment]

Crap. I just erased about 80 pictures from the server. That was a really stupid mistake. I always read about people screwing up with rm -f but I never really though it would happen to me. I was actually 2 characters away from erasing all the pictures, so it might have been even worse.

Update: turns out this wasn't as bad as I thought. Still some loss though. I'll email people.
- jim 10-21-2002 12:24 am [link] [1 comment]

David Weinberger is blogging the PopTech conference. Sounds like great stuff. Right now you can tune in here. If you're in the future you can find it around here (plus maybe a little forward or back, depending on how long it goes on.)
- jim 10-20-2002 6:34 pm [link] [add a comment]

Long John Perry Barlow on where we're at: THE AMERICAN REPUBLIC IS DEAD. HAIL THE AMERICAN EMPIRE. OR ELSE.

He makes some important points at the end (yes we were already aware) about the organizers behind the Oct. 26th marches in DC and San Francisco. We all feel like he does. We don't want to support them, but we're going anyway with the hopes of drowning those voices out.
- jim 10-20-2002 6:15 pm [link] [2 comments]

We're standing with Tom Moody at his elevator installation for the dumbo art festival. I can't believe how many people came out for this. Very cool.


- jim 10-20-2002 2:03 am [link] [9 comments]

Two nights ago at Barramundi I dropped my sidekick from about three feet onto a very hard floor. The screen was open, but the unit landed squarley on it's bottom. Thwack.

I picked it up and it was still on, but frozen. Rebooted without a problem and everything was working again. Nice.

Still working on the follow up report. I doubt anyone has used it more than me.
- jim 10-19-2002 8:05 pm [link] [1 comment]

Flat rate wireless data pricing seems to be catching on.

SPRINT PCS JOINED Verizon this week in announcing a nationwide flat fee pricing model for unlimited access to data on its 3G PCS Vision network. Verizon launched an unlimited data plan on its Express Network (3G) this summer.

- jim 10-19-2002 6:10 pm [link] [add a comment]

While my Sister and family were in town we did a little site seeing. One stop was the Winter Garden. I never knew it was called that. This is the glass enclosed space that used to be connected to the WTC by a walkway suspended over the west side highway. I knew it as the yearly location for the orchid show. In any case, it is now rebuilt, and instead of connecting the WTC, it features big windows looking across the street at the huge pit. Probably the best viewing location, although there is really not much to see. As before, palm trees dominate this really cool looking space.


- jim 10-18-2002 9:24 pm [link] [5 comments]

That was harder than I expected. But I finally have my gateway built so that I can email the server the tiny pictures from my sidekick, and the server will take them out of the mail box, put them in the image folder, and add the image information to the database.

Turns out that email attachments are a pain. And PHP imap functions are difficult to understand. Devshed has an excellent article that really helped. Not sure if I could have done it otherwise.

Get ready for a steady stream of tiny low res pictures.
- jim 10-18-2002 9:18 pm [link] [add a comment]

Clear short piece on the broadband paradox.

Not really related, but one semi interesting thing I've noticed through using the sidekick is that the most important thing about broadband is that it's always connected. Speed is nice, but being always on is more important. I'd like to see everybody connected.
- jim 10-17-2002 8:04 pm [link] [2 comments]

Adhocracy. Nicely put. This is important stuff. (via treedragon)
- jim 10-17-2002 7:51 pm [link] [add a comment]

The entire text of the new O'Reilly book Creating Applications with Mozilla is available on line.

At one time I was very excited about this sort of thing. I thought that Mozilla would be the cross platform development environment that would break the microsoft stranglehold on the industry. Didn't really turn out that way, but it's not exactly a bust either. Or, I mean, while the truth might not have lived up to the hype, there's still a lot of cool stuff you can do with Mozilla. And it's a great browser, which is sort of the point anyway.
- jim 10-17-2002 7:45 pm [link] [add a comment]

2 billion year old nuclear reactors? It's true. (via boing boing)
- jim 10-17-2002 7:41 pm [link] [1 comment]

Apple obsession on the big screen.
- jim 10-17-2002 7:39 pm [link] [add a comment]

Deep Fritz has tied the score in its match against human chess world champion Vladimir Kramnik. Fun story. (via robotwisdom)
- jim 10-17-2002 1:24 am [link] [1 comment]

An Ani DeFranco poem.
- jim 10-17-2002 1:06 am [link] [add a comment]

Looks like fall 2003 will be a good time to buy a new Mac. Yum. Here's the slashdot thread.
- jim 10-14-2002 8:08 pm [link] [1 comment]

The site has been slow lately, and now this morning it was completely unreachable. Looks like an overfull disk was the problem. Should be better now.
- jim 10-13-2002 6:53 pm [link] [2 comments]

I was a little weirded out to see some of my spams coming through with *****spam***** prepended to the subject line. I wondered if maybe this was some reverse psychology trick to get me to look inside. Instead, it turns out my dialup ISP has started using spam assassin. My own filters in OS 10.2 mail.app completely demolish all my spam anyway, but it's nice to see them making an effort.
- jim 10-13-2002 12:12 am [link] [add a comment]

My sister and her husband and my little niece Mary are coming for the weekend. Lots of eating planned. It will be fun to see them. I love when people come to visit NYC and I can show it off. Fun starts tonight at Alias.

[yeah, I moved this entry.]
- jim 10-12-2002 8:43 pm [link] [5 comments]

Holy cow! Looks like you can now build 100% native Cocoa applications for OS X 10.2 written entirely in Python.

What does that mean? Well, it might mean that someone like me, who's not a "real" programmer, but is quite comfortable in scripting languages like Perl, PHP, (and given a weeekend to get up to speed) Python, could write a "real" program that runs right on your desktop (and not in your browser.) Traditional Cocoa applications, on the other hand, are usually written in Objective C. That's a "real" language. Definitely more than a weekend for me to learn enough about that to do anything. And possibly out of my range all together.

This is the dream, it seems, that many people have for OS X. Including myself. Make the insides accessible to mere mortals. Let us build stuff with our machines, not just consume what's coming down the wire. And make the building process easy. Python looks like the way to go. If I'm understanding this correctly I'm very excited.
- jim 10-12-2002 7:50 pm [link] [add a comment]

The new Beck album Sea Change is really nice. Meeeeelllllloooow. Thanks Dave.
- jim 10-12-2002 7:39 pm [link] [add a comment]

Lots of meetings this week for the Oct. 26th DC trip. I can see why I've never done anything political before. I really like everyone involved, but it's pretty boring hashing out political differences (and this is inside the group where we all pretty much agree.) It takes a really long time to come to the most simple decisions. Of course I'm no help at all. Luckily we have some folks who really know what they are doing.
- jim 10-12-2002 6:32 pm [link] [9 comments]

Lessig argued today. Kottke has a nice paragraph and some links including Matt "metafilter" Haughey's thoughts, as well as some news links and first hand reports.
- jim 10-10-2002 2:17 am [link] [1 ref] [2 comments]

I've lost the power cord to my Canon camera (some time ago.) Any chance anyone here has seen it?
- jim 10-10-2002 12:23 am [link] [1 comment]

Working like mad on Washington DC protest trip organization. Being so (un)wired is incredibly useful for trying to put something like this together. More info soon. Websites should be live by Monday.

Makes me think of Howard Reingold's new book Smart Mobs (good intro at that link.) The front page of the site is a weblog, of course.
- jim 10-10-2002 12:18 am [link] [1 comment]

Insanely detailed (and footnoted) 9-11 timeline. Leans toward the conspiracy side if that interests or outrages you. Either way, the depth is amazing.
- jim 10-09-2002 7:16 pm [link] [2 comments]

If everything were this easy...

My friends second generation iMac had a severe crash that rendered the machine unbootable. They took it to Tek Serve where they were told the problem was a hard disk hardware failure, with no chance of recovery. One night, in a (most likely) drunken state I was boasting that they should let me take a crack at it. Although I do know a lot about Macs, I also know that Tek Serve is very good. So if they couldn't rescue it, I probably couldn't either.

But, I figured it would at least give me a chance to try the Mr. Barrett hard drive in the freezer trick. I've been dying to wow someone with that. Of course I'd only try it if all other avenues had been exhausted.

So first I put the drive into a blue & white g3 tower and tried to boot it. No luck, and worse, the drive was making some scary sounds as it spun up. So I popped Disk Warrior into the CD tray and rebooted from that. It couldn't mount the drive, but it was seeing it. So I let DW repair the directory structure. 10 seconds later the drive mounts on the desktop. I copied all the data onto my other drive without incident (although I don't know how much data was originally on the drive, so possibly some things were still lost - although it really doesn't look that way.)

So the obvious question is: why doesn't Tek Serve run Disk Warrior in every case like this? I really can't believe they don't. Maybe the drive "fixed itself" slightly by just sitting for a few days? Seems unlikely too. I wonder what the real story is.
- jim 10-08-2002 9:08 pm [link] [9 comments]

I'll be at the Central Park anti-war rally today in the East Meadow. I'll report from the scene in the comment thread below.
- jim 10-06-2002 7:37 pm [link] [15 comments]

"Basically, I got on the plane with a bomb. Basically, I tried to ignite it. Basically, yeah, I intended to damage the plane."

- Richard Reid

- jim 10-06-2002 1:08 am [link] [4 comments]

I've put up a longer review of the T-Mobile Sidekick. Executive summary: yes.
- jim 10-05-2002 12:12 am [link] [add a comment]

Current high score on the built in asteroids game on my mobile: 38825. Damn them for including that.
- jim 10-03-2002 11:40 pm [link] [6 comments]

I fixed the problem with email notification for new comments (this was only a problem for registered users, I believe that unregistered email notification was working fine.) So now I get an email whenever someone leaves a comment here. Click the link in the emal and I'm looking at the new comment on my mobile (I think I'm going to call it a mobile since it's not really a phone.) So response times should be much improved.

In other news, I think t-mobile might regret giving me unlimited data. Mwahahahah.
- jim 10-02-2002 10:53 pm [link] [add a comment]

Multiple police helicopters hovering over the east village. Im on a and 5th walking north trying to see what is going on.

Helicopter sweeps (very low) from just north of tompkins to up past 14th.

Ave a is closed northbound at 13th.

14th is closed east of a. Lots of people standing around. Lots of cops. Mounted units. A lady behind me says somebody got shot and they don't have the shooter yet.

That's bad but not so bad. With all those copters in that area I always worry about the huge con ed plant over there. Seems like a decent terrorist target. Of course I'm completely paranoid.

Fox is on the scene, so it's not like this is a scoop or anything. I'll see if any of the photos came out when I get home.
- jim 10-02-2002 9:11 pm [link] [3 comments]

Well, the sidekick picture taking ability is limited. To say the least. The photos are low res and very small. But it's still kind of cool to have a camera with you where ever you go. The unit holds 32 pictures, but you don't really need to hold them because you can attach them to an email and send them to yourself. There doesn't seem to be a way to get uploading through a web form to work. So, of course, what we need is a script on the server side to watch a particular mailbox, and add any picture attachments arriving to the database so that I can include them in my posts. Shouldn't be too hard. Here's an article with the necessary MIME information about email attachments. Now I just have to make it work.
- jim 10-02-2002 7:31 pm [link] [add a comment]

First post from the new device. The web browser is slick. Going out for a walk now. I want to see what sort of reception this thing gets.
- jim 10-02-2002 12:39 am [link] [13 comments]

Could I be any more excited? Today, 10/01/2002 (propitious date, no?) is the start of the next phase. This morning I braved the crazed geek hordes of NYC and secured a T-Mobile sidekick (aka danger hiptop.) This is the coolest device ever. And it's not even activated yet.

For me this is the biggest thing since this site (my first website) went live. That was the first step. Next is to have access to what we've built here (and to what everyone else has built everywhere else on the net) all the time. From anywhere. Unobtrusively. And it's actually happening.

I had a very clear vision one summer day on Cape Cod right before my freshman year of college. This vision informed me that a communications layer was being constructed on top of reality so that people seperated in space could still be together. All points would be cotangent. It wasn't until the spring of the next year that I realized this wasn't some mystical project (or not just a mystical project,) but that people were actually building this thing. Out of computers. That was 1989. It's been great fun watching it all come true.

Leo, a very nice young T-mobile salsman, was a bit bewildered. Apparently there was a line outside the door when he arrived this morning to open up. "We've been selling them like hotcakes!" He said that several times. Here's why: flat rate wireless data pricing. I pay $39/month (less than I'm paying now for voice) and I get unlimited data transfer. That includes email, the web, and AOL IM. As a regular phone the deal is not so good (only 200 on peak minutes a month - 1000 off peak.) And the T-mobile network isn't fully built out (and it's not tri-band, so if you're out of range you are out of luck.) But if you live in or near a city, and you're more interested in data than voice, this thing is a dream come true. I called several stores between 9:00 and 9:30 this morning and most were already sold out. Leo had a few left at his store and I convinced him to hold one for me. They were sold out by the time I left the store.

Unfortunately it might take up to 48 hours (!?!) to activate. So here I sit, sidekick in hand, waiting to enter the new world. This blog is certainly going to change (did I mention it is also a camera?) The goal is to connect the maximum number of people inside a shared information space with the smallest amount of friction possible. The sidekick + weblogs = the next step. Here we go...
- jim 10-01-2002 8:07 pm [link] [14 comments]

The problem with a wireless mouse is that it can run out of charge. Skeptics maintain that even the possiblity of being locked out of your system while your mouse recharges defeats any gains from cutting the cord. I think I agree, but I still want a cordless mouse. So what if it came with a USB mousepad? The wireless mouse will work anywhere, but when used on the pad it will draw power (and recharge) through contact with that surface. This way you could never run out of power. The worst that could happen would be that you'd have to temporarilly use it on the pad if it lost all it's charge (that's assuming you didn't always use it on the pad anyway.)
- jim 9-30-2002 10:39 pm [link] [13 comments]

On October 9th Larry Lessig will finally get his chance before the Supreme Court, as he argues Eldred v. Ashcroft. In light of the present geo-political situation you might be forgiven for not taking the issue of copyright term extension very seriously. But assuming we don't blow ourselves up, or wind up in a global police state, this issue will be very important. Wired has some good coverage. Business Week has a nice summary as well. The future is being decided (too bad this Supreme Court is doing it.)
- jim 9-30-2002 8:43 pm [link] [1 ref] [1 comment]

older posts...